


Termination of Intractable Hiccups

by Attila



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-12 15:55:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19948891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Attila/pseuds/Attila
Summary: In researching his Ig Nobel acceptance speech, [Francis Fesmire] told New Scientist that he found a treatment sure to be more popular with hiccup patients. “An orgasm results in incredible stimulation of the vagus nerve. From now on, I will be recommending sex--culminating with orgasm--as the cure-all for intractable hiccups.”--Hecht, J. (2006, October 6). Ig Nobel prizes hail 'digital rectal massage.'New Scientist.Retrieved from https://www.newscientist.com/





	Termination of Intractable Hiccups

**Author's Note:**

> The entire justification for this fic is _extremely contrived_ , but you read that summary and then clicked anyway, so I don't know what you were expecting. But the _New Scientist_ article quoted there and that Peter references does exist and can be found [here](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10207-ig-nobel-prizes-hail-digital-rectal-massage/), and the title comes from the actual medical article Francis Fesmire wrote about this. Science says you can get rid of your hiccups with good sex, guys. And/or anal fingering.
> 
> Timeline-wise, this probably comes somewhere between _The Hanging Tree_ and _Lies Sleeping_ , but in an alternate universe where Peter and Beverley broke up.

I’d had the hiccups for twenty days and counting when Seawoll and Nightingale decided between them that we needed a Falcon-equipped stakeout of a bar in Southwark. The place was called the Dog and Bone, and despite being right smack in the tourist center of London, it managed to be the kind of place where you’d maybe find ten blokes total, all staring into their pints and not talking even slightly, all night every night. That would’ve been suspicious all on its own and definitely worthy of a little community policing to see, if nothing else, how they kept things that quiet and whether or not it could be replicated in some of the rowdier neighborhoods. On top of that, though, when Sahra and I shook down Zach Palmer—by way of buying him a full English breakfast and giving him a ride—he said it was also a shady joint and not somewhere we’d find nice members of the demimonde like him.

Now, neither I nor any other member of the Metropolitan Police Department would ever describe Zach as a nice member of anything, even if he does make a pretty reliable informant on non-Lesley goings on, so I took this to mean that this was where we could find some real bastards. The kind of bastards who might be selling human and non-human body parts for potion ingredients (and snacks) and thus the kind of bastards who might be buying from Noel Dixon, our latest Most Wanted.

Also, incidentally, the kind of bastards likely to recognize Nightingale on sight, so he was right out for ‘sit at the bar and keep an eye out’ duty. I watched him and Seawoll realize this, and then they both looked at Sahra.

“I don’t drink,” she reminded them. “Think it’ll draw attention if I order a soda water?”

“Dammit,” Seawoll said, which meant ‘yes, lots.’ They looked, reluctantly, at me.

I hiccuped.

#

I’d like to emphasize that, unlike many things that go wrong in my life, the possibly magically-induced hiccups were not my fault. Mostly. There was this situation that’d started with a hell of a lot of cocaine, some half-fae, and an open flame. That was when I got involved, so naturally it ended with Nightingale fishing me and the Asbo out of the Neckinger. When I’d come out, half-spitting and half-swallowing what felt like half the river, I’d also started hiccuping. And then I hadn’t stopped. And I kept right on not stopping, all the way through people telling me to drink some water very slowly, hold my breath for a minute, and Nightingale setting off a fireball about a foot behind me. Just to be helpful.

And if that hadn’t done it—well, to be honest, for that last one, I’d recognized his _signare_ in the seconds before the spell went off, so I wasn’t actually especially… He would never hurt me, is my point. And I knew that, and apparently my subconscious knew that, and so while I’d spent a good couple seconds looking around for why the sudden bomb in our own home, I’d never actually been _worried_ , as such. Despite all the near-death experiences I’ve had over the last few years, apparently my brain didn’t buy another one as being particularly likely on Nightingale’s home patch while he was there looking after me. I hadn’t tried to explain that to him, though, because I couldn’t come up with a way to put it that didn’t sound embarrassingly mushy.

Instead, I’d just kept hiccuping and let him assume I’d been properly frightened but that Nicky’s revenge was a little tougher than that.

See, the _other_ thing that had happened right before the Oncoming Hiccups was that Bev and I had accepted the inevitable and called it quits on trying to be anything other than good friends. No hard feelings, no shouting matches, just it kind of completely fizzling out at last. We’d been mostly done months and months before, so we’d finally shrugged our shoulders and gone back to actually watching Netflix when we chilled. Try to tell Nicky that, though. Never my biggest fan since the whole thing with Skygarden, she’d taken my split from her sister as proof that I was the worst kind of using fuckboy and hadn’t been shy about telling me so. Explaining amicable breakups to her hadn’t helped particularly, and given that swallowing the water from _her_ river had started this whole thing, I was willing to lay the Case of the Hiccups That Would Not Die squarely at her door.

#

“Hmm,” Nightingale said, as I sat there hiccuping miserably.

“Grant,” Seawoll growled, making it clear that any hiccup-related shenanigans needed to stop immediately, before they made it any harder for him to close a murder case. That _was_ a bit frightening, but I hiccuped again anyway.

“It’s not as though hiccuping is exactly a sign of being a member of the police,” Sahra said, which would’ve felt more helpful if she hadn’t been smirking the whole time she said it. “Or even a practitioner.”

“Ever been in the Dog and Bone?” Seawoll shook his head. “I had some plain-clothes take a quick look. Apparently, it’s so quiet in there they don’t like it when you turn newspaper pages too loudly. They’ll notice hiccups. Even if they don’t make him as one of us, they’ll make a _note_ of him, which is the opposite of the point of a fucking stakeout.” He fixed with me with a stern glare. “Grant. Fix it.”

“I’ve been— _hic—_ trying!” I protested. I was aware that I sounded distinctly whiny, but for Christ’s sake, this shite had been going on nearly three weeks now, what did he think I’d been doing? Enjoying it? I could barely sleep.

“This is not Peter’s fault,” Nightingale said in a quelling tone, frowning at Seawoll. “And is far more inconvenient for him than any of us, I assure you.” Which was especially sweet when you remembered that I’d nearly set him on fire last week while trying for a _lux impello_ and hiccuping halfway through. When my body spasmed on a big one now, though, he looked at me, his brow furrowing in a way I recognized as worry. “Nevertheless, we shall devote the full resources of the Folly to fixing the problem.”

Nice, but after twenty days of fuck-all, not especially comforting. Seawoll rolled his eyes, so clearly he didn’t think so either.

“I’ll go talk to Michael,” Sahra offered. “Sometimes he knows something you lot don’t.”

Nightingale nodded, and she was off. “Come along, Peter,” he said. “Let’s go home. Perhaps Molly will…” He trailed off. If Molly had known how to fix it, she would’ve done it already.

I hiccuped sadly, and he shook his head.

#

He disappeared when we made it back to the Folly, maybe actually to bother Molly—in which case, better him than me—and I went up to my bedroom and dithered over the extension phone line I’d installed there. After an embarrassingly long time, I managed to screw my courage to the sticking place by way of releasing the tattered remnants of my pride and dignity. It wasn’t that hard; I didn’t have a whole lot left.

“Hey, babes,” said Beverley Brook, after I made myself dial. “What’s up?”

“Um,” I said, and hiccuped. She started laughing, with all the sympathy I’d come to expect from my friends.

“What, still?”

“Yes,” I said, annoyed. “Still. Look, do you think your sister— _hic_ —damn! Do you think you could talk your sister into dropping it? It’s important. Honestly.”

She snickered. “I bet it is, but no way. And honestly, Peter, before you ask me to go talk to Effra or Oberon for you, I don’t think it matters what Nicky does. Even if she got it going, she doesn’t have to do anything anymore to keep it up. She just made them bad and hard to get rid of, and now they’re still here and still bad and still hard to get rid of. And hilarious. But she’s not, like, thinking ‘okay, Peter’s going to hiccup now’ every thirty seconds or whatever.”

“She doesn’t— _hic—_ have to maintain concentration or something?” I said hopefully. It’s not just a thing in Dungeons and Dragons. I have to do that with spells, so I’d thought maybe it was just universal. Not that the Rivers do spells, exactly.

Bev snorted. “No. It’s just happening now. Sorry, babes.”

 _See?_ I told an imaginary Nicky. _She still likes me fine! I’m not an asshole!_ In real life, I took a deep breath to get my nerve up, hiccuped again, and said, “Listen, uh, Bev.”

“Mm?”

“Would you want to—I mean—get together and—for old time’s sake?”

There were a couple of beats of silence, broken only by my periodic and unstoppable interjections. Then she said, “What?”

I groaned and put my head in my hands. “Sex. You and me. Please?”

“No, I got that, I meant _what_?”

“I really think it might help,” I said helplessly, and she started laughing again.

“That is the worst pickup line I’ve ever heard in my entire life,” she told me, once she wasn’t just making wheezing noises into the phone. “And I’ve been hanging out with university boys.”

The thing is, in 2006, Francis Fesmire won the coveted Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine for figuring out how to cure hiccups. His actual research findings were about, uh, digital rectal massage, but he did say in an interview after that any sex—with orgasm, mind—would probably do it. And that he’d personally recommend it. And yes, I did know that for a fact, firstly because I’d become somewhat invested in hiccup cures lately, and secondly because the Ig Nobel is one of my favorite things ever. I’d sort of been thinking about it in the back of my head all this time, I just hadn’t been quite desperate enough to try and hook up with my ex-girlfriend until an actual murder investigation actually hinged on me being able to keep quiet in a pub for a few hours.

I didn’t quite try to explain all of that to Beverley, but I got the gist across, over her continuing laughter. “Oh, no,” she said once I’d finished. “No. Definitely not. I am not fucking my ex to get rid of his hiccups. Maybe in a couple months, when it’ll be less likely to win me an award for ‘stupidest shit to pull while you’re getting over a relationship.’”

“If I’m still hiccuping in a couple months, I’m going to kill myself,” I muttered. “And this is— _hic_ —time sensitive.”

“Still,” she said. “Go tell the next hot person you see that you need to bang them for justice, see where that gets you.” And, still cackling, she hung up on me.

Which is when I looked up and realized that I’d forgotten to close my door and also that that was a _bad_ thing, because Nightingale was standing right on the threshold staring at me. I thought of asking him how much he’d heard, but given how pink his cheeks and ears were, I was guessing I already knew the answer and that it wasn’t anything likely to preserve whatever shame I had left.

We stared at each other. I hiccuped.

He opened and closed his mouth, and I thought about Bev’s parting advice to ask the next hot person I saw to bang me for justice. Then I declined Latin verbs in my head for thirty seconds, because my boss is sort of distractingly fit even when I’m not thinking about him, well. Devoting his full resources to fixing the problem. “Hello,” I said eventually, because one of us had to start talking eventually.

He swallowed and then cleared his throat a few times. “Ah, yes. Hello. I was just—that is, Molly indicated that short of attempting haemomancy, she has no idea how she could help.”

Since haemomancy involved her drinking my blood and has never been named as a cure for anything except vicious revenants wandering London, I wasn’t going to put that as option number one.

“Right,” I said anyway, on another hiccup. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

He winced. “Please don’t.” He took a couple steps backwards as if he were going to leave, and then he said, “On the phone, was that—” And then he cut himself off, like he realized what a massive invasion of privacy that might be.

But me and Nightingale hadn’t had anything resembling privacy from each other in years, so I just shrugged and brazened through the awkwardness to say, “Beverley. We’re still friends, you know, and I thought she might…” I thought of telling him what I thought she might do and lost my nerve. Apparently I can’t say the word ‘sex’ to my hot boss, even after he’s heard me propositioning my ex-girlfriend on the phone. Instead I said, feeling the need to defend myself, “Science says it works?”

“Really,” he said faintly. He was thoroughly and sort of adorably red now, and here we were talking about sex, and God, I wanted him to go away so that I could have my hard-on in peace. “Well, then, have you tried—that is—” I stared at him blankly, and he finally made a crude gesture with one hand and managed to get out, his voice tinged with desperation, “Self-pollution, Peter.”

Right. God, now I was probably blushing too. If embarrassment was a cure for hiccups, I’d’ve been well shot of them after thirty seconds of this conversation. “Yes,” I choked out. “It wasn’t—I think—these are really bad hiccups, and I think I might need something better than what I can do for myself?” I got the last bit out all in a rush. “So I thought maybe Bev—but she says it’s a bad idea, since we didn’t break up all that long ago.”

“Of course.” His voice came out a little high-pitched, and he had to clear his throat a couple more times. “And any other, ah, former partners of yours?”

I’d thought about it, but—my last ex before Bev was Simone. He must’ve seen it on my face and made the connection, because he looked guilty and shook his head. “Never mind. I’m sure—I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”

And then he fled, which was just as well.

#

I was going through the magical library for the millionth time, looking for anything helpful and actually considering calling Ash and asking him the same thing I’d asked Beverley—bicurious, Falcon-aware, and a bit of a slut was looking pretty good right about then, regardless of how very much I did not want to sleep with Ash Thames—when Nightingale coughed delicately to get my attention. He was blushing again, I noticed with a vague sense of doom.

“I hope you know you’re welcome to—to—to go out and—deal with things. As you see fit. And while the Folly itself isn’t necessarily open to guests, there’s always the coach house.”

Oh, God, he was telling me go out and pull. And bring someone home to screw on the couch he watched the rugby on. I wasn’t sure which was worse: that I was having this conversation with my boss or that I was having this conversation with the person I’d quite like to go to the coach house with. “I can barely— _hic_ —talk,” I reminded him. “And telling someone that I need to sleep with them to get rid of my hiccups so I can save the people of London from an organ-harvesting murderer is more likely to get me slapped than laid.”

“Yes, I see that would be a problem,” he said, except then he didn’t leave. We kept staring at each other, and then he licked his lips. “Peter, it’s very important that we catch Noel Dixon, and you may be the only person—”

I groaned and let my head drop down onto the open book in front of me. “I know,” I said, my words a little muffled by the pages. “I’m _trying_ , sir.”

“No,” he said quickly. “No, that isn’t what I meant. It’s just that, under the circumstances, since it’s so important, I could…help.”

I had to go through that sentence three times before I was convinced I’d heard what I thought I’d heard. I picked up my head and looked at him, and yeah, he was so red it was a shock he hadn’t spontaneously combusted, which tracked. “Help?” I had to say it three times before my voice came out as more than a squeak, especially since the second time I got cut off by another hiccup.

“You know. With your…idea.” He swallowed hard. I watched him do it. “The science.”

“You want to help me with the sex science?” I repeated dumbly.

He coughed. “If that would be…helpful.” He fiddled with one of his cufflinks and didn’t meet my eyes. “I apologize if I’ve made you uncomfortable; I know it’s inappropriate, I only thought that under the circumstances it might be—well, since—under the circumstances—”

“You already said that,” I managed, and he twitched.

“Yes, well. I’ll just…” He gestured behind him vaguely. “I just thought I could…offer. Just in case.”

He turned to go, and without any permission from my brain, my mouth said, “No, wait.” He stopped, and I squeezed my eyes shut, because where the hell had _that_ come from? On the scale of bad sex ideas, ‘my fit boss who I’ve got a thing for pity-fucked me to get rid of my hiccups and also bring a murderer to justice’ had to be pretty high. And also wholly unique in the history of the world. But on the other hand— “Okay,” I said, before I could talk myself out of it.

“Okay?” he repeated, like he couldn’t quite believe I’d said it. Which made two of us.

“Yeah, okay. Help— _hic_ —help me with the sex science.”

He stared at me, and then he took a deep breath and closed the library door behind him. The sound made both of us jump a little. “All right,” he said, started towards me, and stopped again. “Is—is anything in particular necessary?”

“Um.” Oh, God, we were about to fuck. In the _library_ , apparently. I was never going to be able to read in this room again without getting hard. “According to Francis Fesmire, just—sex. Culminating in orgasm. There was a paper,” I added stupidly.

“Well.” His voice was a little faint, but it also had a hint of that steel in it: the Nightingale, who’d come out of World War II by walking back out of Ettersberg on foot and brought a barn down on Varvara’s head last year. I went ahead and let that turn me on, because at this point I might as well. “I think we can manage that, don’t you?”

I moistened my dry mouth and pushed my chair away from the reading table, meaning to get up and meet him halfway, but he crossed the room in just a few long-legged strides and dropped to his knees in front of me before I so much as stood. I stared at him, and he put both his hands, his warm broad palms, on my thighs. He leaned forward a little, pushing my knees apart, and said, “All right, Peter?”

I nodded, because I couldn’t trust myself to speak. And then I hiccuped, which would’ve ruined the mood, except then he slid his hands up to my fly and nothing was going to ruin that mood for me. He took his time unzipping and drawing me out, so that by the time he did, I was already mostly hard. “Oh, good,” he said, quietly enough that I wasn’t sure I was supposed to hear it, and then he licked a long stripe along the thick vein on the underside of my dick, and I stopped thinking entirely.

“Oh, fuck,” I said. I may have whimpered. He put his hand around the base of my cock and then kissed the tip lightly, and my hands leapt to the arms of the chair and gripped them as tightly as I could. When he took the head into his mouth and sucked, I almost bit my tongue trying to keep quiet. Usually I’m talkative in bed—I can’t help it. Everything that comes into my head comes straight out without asking first. But the things I was thinking of just then weren’t things you said to someone you weren’t actually dating, so I gritted my teeth together and tried to keep quiet.

It was almost worse that way. I could hear the slick, wet sounds as he started to take me in deeper, and I could hear my own panting breaths, almost obscenely loud in the silence of the library. And it didn’t matter that I wasn’t telling him how amazing he felt, how hot and tight his mouth was on my cock, how gorgeous he was with his lips red and spit-slick, with his cheeks hollowed and his eyes half-closed while he sucked me. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t telling him that I’d thought of exactly this just last night while I proved for the umpteenth time that I couldn’t cure my own damn hiccups. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t telling him how perfect he was, because I was still sitting there thinking it.

And then I hiccuped so hard my dick jerked in his mouth.

There was a moment of silence, and then he pulled off and started laughing, swiping the back of his hand over his mouth to wipe it casually. I swatted at him blindly without trying to make contact and said, “Stop it; it’s not that funny.”

He didn’t even bother to dignify that with a response, which was just as well. I wouldn’t even have minded, except I felt like a knob sitting there with my dick out, still hiccuping, and he was just laughing helplessly, his forehead resting warmly on my thigh. I might’ve been able to feel his breath on the inside of my leg. It wasn’t helping.

My hips twitched without permission, and he lifted his head to look at me, still grinning broadly, laugh lines at the corners of his eyes. “All right,” he said. “I suppose I’d better hurry it up, hadn’t I?”

And then without preamble, he put his mouth back on me and swallowed me down to the root, his throat relaxing around my cock. I almost choked trying to keep from shouting loud enough to be heard down the block, but managed to turn it into a strangled groan. When he started bobbing his head, hollowing his cheeks, I almost shook with the strain of not fucking up into his mouth.

If all I could do was sit there not moving, I was going to start talking anyway and cement my eternal humiliation. “Sir,” I said. “Sir, I—”

He pulled off again, licking his lips. My hips jerked towards him futilely. “Really, Peter, do you think you could call me something else right now? Considering.”

Considering he was going down on me like a pro, that was. I shifted in the chair again, realizing all of a sudden that we were sitting in the fucking library and neither of us had taken off a stitch of clothing, and my boss was giving me some of the best head I’d ever gotten. Christ. “N—Thomas,” I said, because if I called him by his surname while we did this, I’d sound like one of those old white men who talk about pulling off their public school dormmates as if it was a heterosexual bonding experience. This did not feel like a heterosexual bonding experience.

He smiled at me, and my pulse jumped. “Yes, Peter?”

“I—could I— _hic_ —” I couldn’t get the words out, but with effort I unclenched my right hand from the chair and awkwardly brushed it through his hair. It was soft and just a little tacky from whatever he used to make it stay back.

He blinked. “Oh. Yes, of course. Whatever you like.”

Whatever I’d like. Fuck, I was in so much trouble. He took me in his mouth again, and this time I let my hand fall into his hair. Not pulling, because I definitely check in with every party’s kinks before trying anything like that, just kind of running my fingers through it. Messing it up, so even with the three-piece bloody suit he was still wearing, he didn’t look quite so put together. I brushed my fingers down the side of his face, and one of them just caught the edge of his eyelashes, long and soft, and I felt him shudder.

He was so beautiful that I felt dumb and clumsy trying to put my hands on him, but then his eyes drifted all the way shut and he pushed into the palm of my hand, humming in satisfaction, and I said, “Oh, oh, Thomas,” and came in a rush.

He swallowed without any apparent consternation, like that hadn’t been a dick move, spilling in his mouth without warning. But it didn’t seem to bother him, because he just sucked and licked at my softening cock until I was squirming and oversensitive, and then he finally pulled off.

“Holy shit,” I said, slumping back and letting my head fall against the chair. I stared at the ceiling, catching my breath, and then I didn’t hiccup. And didn’t hiccup. And didn’t hiccup.

“Holy shit,” I repeated. “I can’t believe that _worked_.”

“Did you not think it was going to?” Thomas said, still kneeling at my feet, his voice sandpaper rough from—fuck, from deepthroating me.

“I mean, there was an article in _New Scientist_ , but it’s not like I’ve had a reason to try it before.” I pushed myself properly upright again and looked him, sitting between my legs, cheeks flushed and hair a disaster. “Um.”

The flush deepened, and he drew back, away from me. “Yes, well,” he said abruptly. “I’m very glad it worked and that you’ll be able to go to the Dog and Bone tonight after all.” He got to his feet in the clumsiest movement I’d ever seen from him, shifting his suit jacket awkwardly. It didn’t help. Bespoke tailoring really hides nothing, and the minute he’d gotten up, I’d seen that he was as hard as a rock in those expensive trousers.

I snatched at him to keep him from leaving, and ended up a fist full of his waistcoat, trying to think of something smooth to say. Instead, what came out was, “Do you want some help with that?”

He hesitated, looking awkward and embarrassed to be caught out. “I don’t know if that’s appropriate.”

“You just had my dick in your mouth. I think turnabout is as appropriate as it gets.”

“Peter,” he said, but I didn’t want to hear all the reasons this was a bad idea. I already knew them, backwards and forwards and in Latin. So instead I yanked hard on his vest, and he stumbled into me, and I kissed him.

For a second, it was awful, and then he groaned and practically climbed into my lap, kissing back and opening up for me. I could taste myself in his mouth, bitter and a little salty, and I could feel the hard line of his cock when he ground it against my thigh.

“Yeah,” I said breathlessly when we broke apart. “Yeah, don’t worry, I’ve got you.”

It took both of us to get his trousers open, fumbling wildly and getting in each other’s way, and then I stopped bothering with finesse and shoved my hand straight into his pants to get a grip on him. He bucked up into it and said, “ _Peter_.”

I didn’t bother drawing it out, him obviously being too wound up to want anything other than hard and fast. I brought my hand back out once to spit onto the palm, and then I just worked him over until he moaned into the crook of my neck and came all over my shirt.

Then there was just the sound of our panting as his come cooled between us.

He finally straightened up, tucking himself back into his pants with hands that shook a little. “Peter,” he said, and I could tell just from the tone of his voice that he was getting ready to put all his barriers back up between him and the world, to be straight-backed and serious and my governor. So I kissed him again.

It was a terrible idea, except a lot of my ideas have been terrible, and plenty of them worked out. And there wasn’t a single one that felt as fantastic as his lips on mine and the way he leaned into me and put a hand on my shoulder to steady himself.

“Peter,” he said again quietly when we’d finished, but I already liked the sound of that better: soft and friendly and little teasing. Like a hello, all wrapped up in his ridiculous posh accent and the syllables of my name.

“So, do I have to get Nicky to give me the hiccups again to get a repeat performance,” I asked, “or can I just take you out for dinner instead?”

“Peter,” he said, one more time. I swear to God that I could actually hear my heart pounding while he hesitated, and then he laughed suddenly. “We go out for dinner all the time, so I suppose that really, you could’ve been doing that for years.”

“What, seriously?”

He brushed his hair back from his face, and I smiled stupidly. “Why, is that something that would’ve interested you?”

“Uh, _yeah_. Fuck, let’s go out for dinner right now, and then let’s—”

“You have to go out on a stakeout right now.”

“Oh, hell.” I dropped my head onto his shoulder and groaned. “Can’t it wait?”

“Peter, there’s a murderer—”

“There’s always a murderer,” I muttered. “There would still be a murderer _after_ we went on a date.”

He pressed his thumb into the back of my neck, and I sighed in pleasure, letting the play at annoyance go. He was right, of course, and I wanted to get Noel Dixon as badly as he did. The thumb rubbed a slow circle on my skin, and he said, “That may be, but I will still be here after we’ve finished the job.”

I picked my head up so I could look him in the eye. “Yeah?”

“Oh, yes.” There was a smile starting to form at the edges of his mouth. “You may feel free to count on it.”

**Author's Note:**

> Edits, as always, done by Rose (zornslemon on AO3, acommonrose on tumblr), who is a hero of our time and has been dealing with me and my terrible run-ons for just under ten years now.
> 
> Bar named with help from tumblr users hugger-of-trees, longroadstonowhere, and jewishsuperfam, because I couldn't come up with anything. Thanks, guys, I really appreciate it!
> 
> If you had fun reading this (and I really hope you did, as it was a blast to write), let me know by dropping me a comment here or on tumblr (where I'm attilarrific), or by reblogging the [tumblr post](https://attilarrific.tumblr.com/post/186508654471/new-session-archive-of)!


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